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Goodies

What this study offers is a solution that is more damning than the “problem” that it addresses. If a four-year-old child has to disassociate, to pretend that she is someone else, in order to cope with the demands of your program, your program needs to stop, today.

Despite decades of compromised sound classical music survives very well in London because music is remarkably resilient. The brain’s miraculous psychoacoustic compensation abilities mean that some of the content can be stripped out without destroying the music’s essence – MP3 and other lossy formats depend on this. Sonic excellence is a laudable goal. But classical music can and will survive despite compromised concert halls and compromised audio systems. Like Class A audio systems, acoustically perfect concert halls and are a ‘very nice to have’ but not a ‘must have’.

This argument certainly applies to net neutrality in a far more profound way: the Internet has been the single most important driver of not just economic growth but overall consumer welfare for the last two decades. Given that all of that dynamism has been achieved with minimal regulatory oversight, the default position of anyone concerned about future growth should be maintaining a light touch. After all, regulation always has a cost far greater than what we can see at the moment it is enacted, and given the importance of the Internet, those costs are massively more consequential than restaurants or just about anything else.